President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday appointed Gail Slater, an antitrust veteran and economic adviser to JD Vance, to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division and take charge of a full suite of successful antitrust cases against companies, including Google, Visa and Apple.
Slater is expected to continue the department’s crackdown on Big Tech, including cases brought during Trump’s first term in the White House, Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform.
“Big Tech has been running amok for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to strike at the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech! ” Trump said.
Slater served on the White House National Economic Council in 2018, where he worked on Trump’s executive order on national security concerns over Chinese telecommunications equipment.
Before joining Vance’s office, Slater worked at Fox Corp. and Roku.
Vance, the vice president-elect, has said antitrust officials need to take a broader approach to antitrust enforcement and praised the work of Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan.
Slater grew up in Dublin, Ireland and began her legal career in London at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, which brought her to Washington.
She spent 10 years at the FTC, first as an antitrust attorney where she brought cases to block mergers, including Whole Foods’ acquisition of organic grocer Wild Oats, and later as counsel to then-Commissioner Julie Brill, who later became an executive at Microsoft. .
Slater also represented Big Tech companies including Amazon and Google at a now-defunct trade group called the Internet Association.
She is still seen as an antitrust hawk among tech skeptics in Washington, who welcomed her appointment.
Garrett Ventry, a former Republican congressional adviser and founder of GRV Strategies, said Slater’s appointment shows Trump is “serious about Big Tech.”
“Antitrust enforcement is here to stay,” Ventry said.
The Tech Oversight Project, a group that supported the work of Biden’s DOJ antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, said the appointment shows antitrust has staying power as a bipartisan political issue.
“Gail Slater is a strong candidate to continue that work,” said Sacha Haworth, the group’s chief executive.
Slater will take on a number of high-profile cases in which some of the world’s biggest companies are accused of illegally building and protecting monopolies.
Trump said Slater will “ensure that our competition laws are enforced, vigorously and fairly, with clear rules that facilitate, rather than stifle, the ingenuity of our biggest companies.”
The appointment would put Slater in charge of the DOJ’s bid to get Google to sell its Chrome browser and take other measures to curb its dominance of Internet search.
The DOJ raised the case in 2020, during the first Trump administration. But proposals for fixes came under Kanter.
The judge overseeing the case has said Trump officials will not have additional time to reevaluate the proposals before a trial in April.
Google faces a second battle with the DOJ over its online ad technology, while Apple faces allegations that it monopolized the US smartphone market.
Kanter also filed the first DOJ case alleging algorithmic price-fixing against property management software company RealPage.
In another case, the DOJ is seeking to separate LiveNation and TicketMaster over practices that prosecutors say harm event attendees and artists.
Slater would have broad discretion over the cases, though most are also being pursued by bipartisan state coalitions.
A case the DOJ filed in September alleging that Visa illegally dominates the market for processing debit card payments does not involve state antitrust regulators.
Slater would also be able to continue or end investigations, such as one into Nvidia, the chip company that rode the artificial intelligence boom to become one of the world’s most valuable companies.
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